What the &%$@?

Monica Corcoran Harel loved to let loose with a bawdy curse, but then she discovered science that suggests swearing is more than just a bad habit. It might actually affect your mental health—and how well, or poorly, others treat you.

How's this for a professional epitaph: "I probably wouldn't have said the F-word." It's the recent lament of former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, following her abrupt firing by phone from the company eight months prior. Bartz didn't just let the most visceral of curses slip out like a champagne hiccup at a conference, though. She pepper-sprayed audiences with profanity throughout her two-and-a-half-year tenure at the tech giant. Her indiscretion wasn't entirely her undoing, of course. But the flotilla of criticism that followed—coupled with her belated regret—got this foulmouthed woman wondering: Is it time to give up the F-word?

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It won't be easy. I love to swear. You might vividly recall your first kiss. I don't. But I can easily summon every sense in play the first time I cursed. It was a humid summer night. I was about seven years old, sitting between my brother and sister in the backseat of our forest green station wagon. A tear in the vinyl upholstery nagged at my bare thigh. The blood-sugar fallout from too many Junior Mints and Twizzlers at a drive-in movie made us all punchy, erratic. We were a family of tiger sharks, hardwired to attack. My brother suddenly elbowed me hard, and I turned and hissed, "Fuck you." He gasped. The wagon swerved. Without turning around, my dad reached his open hand back into the dark and smacked me in the ear. It didn't sting. Not even the thunk of his gold college ring could make me wince. I felt only exhilaration.

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Or so I thought. I now know, thanks to Richard Stephens, a senior psychology lecturer at Keele University in the UK, that my profane snarl caused adrenaline to surge through my system. A few years ago, he studied the analgesic benefit of cursing by having students immerse their hands in ice water for as long as they could bear. First they repeated a curse of their choice; then they said an innocuous word. "When they swore, they were better able to tolerate pain," says Stephens, who also noted that above-mentioned adrenaline rush. "Swearing increases the heart rate and sets off the body's flight-or-fight response."

It makes perfect sense when you think about it. Who hasn't popped off after scorching a fingertip or stubbing a toe? And I, for one, was thrilled to hear that it sometimes pays to talk trashy. In fact, Stephens began his research after listening to his wife screech expletives while she delivered their daughter. (For the record, I had an epidural and a blessedly brief labor. Not a bleepworthy peep.) Even more interesting is the fact that Stephens found the most illicit language delivered the most relief. "We have shown a kind of intermediate effect with the less severe words," he says. In essence, if a hollered damn acts like Advil, fuck is, well, Vicodin.

Those really bad words have always been my favorite ones. With just one definitive syllable and a cacophony of dueling consonants, they hit the air hard and fast, like a battery of quick blows. Even closing my eyes and envisioning the four letters, f to k, in cutesy bubble type makes my jaw tighten and my shoulders twitch. That's because swear words seem to be stored in the frontal cortex, which is linked to emotion; ordinary language resides on the left side of the brain. (Knowing that makes it easier to understand why stroke victims who lose the ability to talk can sometimes still spew swears as deftly as Samuel L. Jackson.) Whoever coined the term F-bomb captured both the original word's phonetic power and its resounding quality. And in my opinion, one well-enunciated expletive always trumps strafing a listener with a string of them.

Harvard professor Steven Pinker agrees with me. He is regarded as the Mick Jagger of linguists and devoted a whole chapter to profanity in his 2007 best-seller, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature. "You can use a swear word like fuck to basically ping the emotional centers of the brain and perk up a listener," says Pinker, who speaks softly and makes foul words sound as dainty as French macarons. "But when it is overused, the word shifts from taboo to normal and doesn't have the same effect. We've seen that happen in the twentieth century."

That occurs on every episode of Jersey Shore and lots of other TV shows. A study—slyly titled "Habitat for Profanity"—of network prime-time programming by the conservative advocacy group Parents Television Council found the use of a muted or bleeped F-word jumped 2,409 percent from 2005 to 2010. It went from 11 total instances to 276 over those five years. And that research doesn't even include cable-network reality shows, where it's possible to hear bleep used as a verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, and gerund—all in one sentence. Incidentally, serial swearers do get their comeuppance when it comes to pain management. In a 2011 follow-up to his original study, Stephens found that people who cursed excessively—up to 60 times per day—didn't get any pain relief from it, because the emotional response in the brain weakens after repeated exposure.

You'd never catch me chain-swearing. The power and appeal of bawdy language lie in its ability to disarm. Someone like Snooki reeks of profanity from her pouf to her toe ring. You're not surprised when she detonates six F-bombs in a sentence. I liken that kind of abuse to overaccessorizing. If a sentence—or a little black dress—calls for bold jewelry, a silk scarf, and a fedora, it's time to reevaluate your wardrobe or your vocabulary. I prefer a woman who can casually curse with originality, elegance, and authority. Carole Lombard earned the nickname "the profane angel" because she looked like a sylph but swore like a stevedore.

But my own personal foulmouthed icon will always be the late Elizabeth Taylor. A decade or so ago, I interviewed her in her Bel Air home, with its quicksand-white carpeting and blinding Baccarat on every surface. People warned me that she could be as unpredictable as an electric eel. I was petrified. But within minutes of my arrival, Taylor referred to the hue of her pot of hot-pink lip gloss as "Slut" and told me that a certain colleague "really chapped my ass." She went on to recount an argument with Richard Burton on an airplane that was cleared for takeoff. Taylor had a psychic sense that the flight was going to crash. She turned to her husband and said, "Screw the luggage. I'm leaving." To hear this sixtysomething screen legend—and a dame, no less—talk like a broad put me right at ease. Johnny Depp once said that Taylor "cusses like a sailor, and she's hilarious."

But unlike me, Taylor didn't have a young daughter who mimicked her every word at the time. Plus, celebrities don't really have to pilot their way through polite society. As I get older, I notice that my peers now censor themselves, and I feel like the last girl at the bar, slurring and sloshing her cocktail. I don't remember anyone saying "last call" when it comes to cursing. Some friends tell me that they shed the habit when they became parents. One says that she quit using the big kahuna of swear words after she said "I'm so fucking happy for them" in a wedding toast recorded on video.

Ah, the involuntary gaffe. I don't trust my brain or tongue either. In 1945, Emily Post wrote a column on profanity that profiled me to a tee. She pointed out that "worst of all are the normally well-mannered women who are not even aware of how often they use swear words."

Or unknowingly offend people, for that matter. A recent University of Arizona study, piggybacking on Stephens' theory about swearing and pain, raised the matter of the social cost of cursing. In this case, women coping with breast cancer or rheumatoid arthritis wore recorders, and researchers duly noted their usage of profanity among friends and family. What they found was that the women who cursed—even those who uttered the relatively mild crap—received less support from loved ones. "It wasn't that they were swearing at people, either, which really surprised me," says Megan Robbins, the lead author of the study. "The take-home is that people are sort of repelled by counter­stereotypical behavior."

Now I'm really torn. Obscenity feels like the final frontier of rebellion for me. Pinker tells me that it would be easier on my brain to substitute euphemisms than to go cold turkey. But when I say one aloud, I find myself shaking my head and thinking, I wish I hadn't just said "Oh, fiddlesticks!"